OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in a post on X that adult users will be able to personalize ChatGPT and even generate erotic content. Altman wrote:

In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing).

In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

Romantic and personalized AI apps are already available, but it’s significant that Altman is moving in this direction with his own product, which has dominated the AI conversation over the last three years. In a previous article, I mentioned the budding problem of “AI psychosis,” in which people interact so often and so intimately with AI that they lose perception of what’s real.

Pushback against Altman’s post was swift, as one might expect. Writer Walter Kirn gave some thoughtful commentary on Altman’s rhetoric in an episode of The After Party, hosted by journalist Emily Jashinsky.

Kirn says that people like Altman tend to see human beings as “biological computers.” They think AI can successfully mimic real people because people, in the end, are little more than sophisticated meat machines. If anything, these AI tech moguls are giving away their rather sordid conception of the human person. Understanding ourselves as created in the image of God, intended for relationships with other “ensouled” beings, endowed with irreplaceable creativity and the capacity to experience, distances us a bit more from the complex machines we make.